That article is amusing in that I wonder how the guy plans to compete with
any of the following companies. I also have discovered that I immediately
distrust anyone who is founding their own company saying "well, it's a $xx
billion market". Don't tell me that. Tell me how you will capture your
slice. I don't need to know the size of the overall market. I need to
know the size that your business will do. These days I'm almost
embarrassed to mention that I work for an internet startup. It's like
living in Hollywood and saying you're an actor or that you've written a
screenplay....
Online calendaring companies:
http://www.when.com/
http://www.jump.com/
http://calendar.yahoo.com/ (used to be webcal)
http://www.visto.com/
http://www.anyday.com/
http://www.magicaldesk.com/
http://digital.daytimer.com/ (yes, the planner company)
http://www.appoint.net/
http://www.supercalendar.com/
http://www.calendars.net/
and, of course: http://www.planetall.com/
I assume there are plenty more, as well. It's not that this is a bad idea,
it's just that there are way too many players, and none of them have
anything special. If anything, it's an interesting product idea, but it's
not a business idea. I expect that one of three things will happen to
almost all of these: (1) they get bought by a bigger player (as a few
already have) who wants to add online calendars to their suite of services
(2) they change their business model (or their entire business - as
jump.com did to become jump.com after being both microcontent.com and
clockwise.com prior to this) or (3) they just go out of business.
-Mike
At 09:25 AM 2/21/99 -0800, Gregory Alan Bolcer wrote:
>Heck, you don't have to have a product to get an IPO. This story is
>interesting as they company they mention talks about providing calendaring
>services to people on the WWW. How many people would want their private
>scheduling information stored by some 3rd party? They'd probably sell
>it to the advertisers and marketers in order to get you trip coupons.
>
>Greg
>
>-------- Original Message --------
>Subject: FORTUNE.com: 2/19/1999 - Valley Life: Which Comes First--the
Product or the IPO?
>Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 00:44:18 -0800
>From: M Bolcer <mbolcer@earthlink.net>
>To: "Gregory A. Bolcer" <gbolcer@endeavors.org>
>
>Greg:
>IPO's on the light side.
>Dad
>http://cgi.pathfinder.com/fortune/technology/daily/
>